Whole Categories of U.S. Food Production Are Gone; Money Chaos Will Make Food Disappear Overnight

April 5, 2013 • 9:39AM

On this week's LPAC TV Policy Committee discussion, April 2, Lyndon LaRouche spoke of the food crisis, stressing that you have to understand the intent of the British imperial policy to drastically cut the world's population. He said that, "you're seeing an increase of the drive to reduce the human population, cutting food supplies, and doing everything else possible—not only cutting food supplies, as such, but destroying the sources of crop production, the elimination of the entire categories of food, in the United States in particular...."

This can be seen in many dramatic ways, apart from the obvious losses in basic beef and milk herd numbers, fodder and food crops. Consider certain categories of specialty foods — seafood and fruits and vegetables, for example. Not only are U.S. productive capacities lost, but financial chaos is set to "disappear" whole categories of food overnight, given that output and trade can cease at any moment.

SEAFOOD. Overall, the U.S. is now dependent on foreign sources for 85 percent of its seafood consumption. This involves worldwide imports, especially from China, Southeast Asia, Peru, and a few other points.

Look at catfish — found the world over in the wild, and easily produced on fish farms, as it has been done in North America for ages. But U.S. pond area for catfish farming has dropped 50% since 2007 (mostly in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana); tonnage of U.S.-grown catfish has fallen 35 percent since 2007. Now, over 26 percent of U.S. catfish consumption comes from abroad. More than 75 percent of this imported catfish comes from Vietnam alone, whose exports to the U.S. have tripled since 2008.

The same pattern applies to many other basic food items. This is considered success in the WTO-era.

FRUITS AND VEGETABLES. For fresh produce, depending on the season of the year, at certain times the U.S. is import-dependent for 60 percent of its fresh fruit and vegetable consumption.

Look at frozen broccoli — a food-plant easy to produce. U.S. consumption of frozen broccoli is now 95 percent supplied from imports! This comes mostly from Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. (The U.S. still grows broccoli, a significant portion of which is exported!) As the USDA Economics Research Service wrote in 2012, "Cutting broccoli into florets [for freezing] is a labor-intensive task," so the globalized food cartels moved production out of California in the late 1980s and early 1990s, first to Mexico, and thence to even poorer venues, such as Guatemala.

These food flows into the U.S. continue, despite spreading hunger in Central and South America. Last year, 92,000 CHILDREN DIED OF HUNGER IN GUATEMALA, pointed out international food activist Jean Ziegler, in an interview last week on opednews.com.